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Visiting Our Past: Above the river and industries, neighborhoods incubated

Rob Neufeld, Special to the Citizen Times
Published 7:00 a.m. ET Jan. 1, 2019

Lillian Moore Westmoreland poses in the doorway of Westmoreland Grocery at 10 Roberts Street, April 1902. Left to right are Ralph Robinson, a family friend; and two sons, Ray and Walter Westmoreland.(Photo: Courtesy of Byron Ballard)

Interstate 240 at exit 4A separates Hillcrest Apartments from West End/Clingman Avenue (WECAN). A fenced pedestrian bridge over the highway and a dirt walk-around under it provide connections, but the boundary is almost as forbidding as segregation had been in the pre-Civil Rights era, when the wall hadn’t existed.

At the Roberts Street end of today’s walk-around, there had been located, in the early 20th century, Westmoreland Grocery, run by Benjamin Franklin (“B.F.”) and Lillian Moore Westmoreland. They’d moved to West End in the late 1890s for two reasons, family legend tells: to be near his place of work, the Biltmore Estate, where he was a laborer; and to escape his in-laws, a large Canton family.

B.F. lived a long life with one lung. In addition to pioneering a dry goods store in the West End in the wake of the railroad, he concocted get-rich schemes, patented inventions and acted as a middleman in a bootlegging operation.

“My mother remembered those bottles being around the house,” B.F.’s great-granddaughter, Byron Ballard, told me, and her mother also recalled her parents “hiding bottles of illegal moonshine in her crib when she was little.”

Westmoreland’s served Asheville Cotton Mill village families, among others. The mill provided steady jobs, but was something to avoid if one could. Alternatives to its company store were needed.

When Ballard’s paternal grandmother, Helen Westmoreland, applied for a job in the Asheville Cotton Mill, her brother Roy stepped in. He got her a job at Green’s Hardware on Pack Square instead. Ottis Green, the hardware store owner, had been mayor of Asheville, and was part of the prominent Green family that had grown up in West End.

“Roy was familiar with the cotton mill,” Ballard recounted about her great-uncle, “and he said the conditions were just hellish, and he didn’t want his baby sister working there. The workers couldn’t breathe. There were neighbors all around who had brown lung.”

Those who came

Asheville Cotton Mill, located below Westmoreland’s store, had been established between the river and the tracks by textile pioneers Moses and Ceasar Cone in 1893. The mill village houses spread out from the mill up through “Chicken Hill,” so-called because of chickens in yards, to the Park Avenue homes. The official name of the area was Factory Hill.

By 1901, people and agencies were crying out about cotton mill conditions and the state was looking into child labor laws.

Teenaged Hester Rice accompanied her widowed mother, Margaret Hensley Rice, on foot from Madison County to the cotton mill district in 1902. Margaret had decided that in order to rescue her family from poverty, she had to get a job that provided housing.

She “packed all of their household goods into a wagon, tied a cow to the back, and brought the dog and children,” Hester’s daughter, Hilda Burrell Sands, told Dorothy Joynes in a 1993 interview held by Ramsey Library, UNC Asheville.

“She told the children, ‘If you’re able to walk, walk. The smaller ones shall ride.’ She told (them) to put on all the clothes they could so that they could save space. This was May the seventeenth. It could have been a little warm.”

Hester, the oldest child, was the only wage earner for a while. She worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, and liked to tell people about her first paycheck. Her mom Margaret had used the two-and-a-half dollars to buy, from the company store, “a small amount of corn meal, a small amount of flour, rice, beans, coffee, and, as she said, meat. It was most likely fatback.” The 2 cents left over purchased two sticks of chewing gum.

Eventually, four of Hester’s siblings worked in the cotton mill. She met her husband, James Mitford Earl, there; and after three years, they moved back to Madison County.

Contiguous villages

Except for the big homes on the bluff, there had been a democracy of housing in the cotton mill district and in the African-American neighborhoods on either side, characterized by small homes with close yards, gardens, free-roaming children, and social centers.

“There were mazes of houses,” Marjorie Maxwell told Dorothy Joynes in 1994 about Southside, her African-American neighborhood just south of Factory Hill. She’d grown up there, on Walton Street, during the Depression.

“You could walk out one house and into another come,” she said. “Truck farmers would come … as regular as clockwork …’Vegetable man!’ you could hear them calling.” In winter, the call was for coal, and it came in the middle of the night.”

“You’d look out,” Maxwell recalled, “and see what looked like a caravan of camels coming up through the woods. These men would have bags of coal on their backs … They’d been down on the railroad and stole the coal.

“There was one man, he made a special sack, a croaker sack, that could hold two hundred pounds … Everybody was waiting because you could get a bag of coal for a dollar.” Carolina Coal Company sold a bag for $15.

Hill Street

The African-American neighborhood to the north, of which Hill Street was the hub, had no hill between it and Factory Hill. They were both on the same level of the rise coming up from the river. The Hill Street neighborhood reached from Montford Avenue all the way to Westmoreland’s store.

It would have been convenient for Hill Street folks to have used the store, but I have no evidence one way or the other about how community worked in this regard.

Hill Street featured two grocery stores, Eugene Castion’s at No. 67; and the store William and Fannie Lazarus ran from their home at No. 47.

Several Hill Street residents worked downtown and had easy access to markets. Joseph Davis was a butcher in the City Market; Oscar Arnold, a waiter at the Langren Hotel (now the site of the AC Hotel); and Bertha Jackson, a laundress at Asheville Laundry on Penland Avenue (on a site now occupied by the Rankin Avenue parking garage).

Castion’s across-the-street neighbor, at 64 Hill St., was Rev. Dr. Charles B. Dusenbury, pastor and founder of Calvary Presbyterian Church. The home mission of the Presbyterian Church had engaged Dusenbury in 1891, and in 1894 supported a parochial school in the basement of the church. Dusenbury’s wife Lula and his daughter Viola taught there.

Dusenbury once remarked, “The pupils are taught to be honest and truthful, to be pure in thoughts and habits, to be kind and considerate, and also to be clean in their persons, for we believe in a soap and water gospel as well as the other kind and our efforts are to impress the virtues of each,” a UNC Asheville library webpage quotes him.

There may have been a cultural as well as racial divide between Dusenbury’s people and the Westmorelands’ store, but his hold cannot be considered pervasive.

The Westmorelands were down-to-earth people. B.F. helped establish the Haywood Street M.E. Church and his daughter, Helen, “self-identified and was identified by friends and fellow choir members as a witch,” H. Byron Ballard writes in her book, “Staubs and Ditchwater: A Friendly and Useful Introduction to Hillfolks’ Hoodoo.”

“West End was wild,” Ballard told me. “These people lived rough and they made do the best they could… It was an incubator neighborhood for families that went on to be notable Asheville families. And yet it stayed this kind of half-wild, semi-lawless place.”

She related a story about a West End native whose seatmate on a flight from California had been a man from Biltmore Forest where, the man said, “if you were bad, your parents told you they would take you to West End at dusk and leave you there.”

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, “The Read on WNC.” Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.net; call 828-505-1973.